Boxed Gourmet, a meal delivery service that has been serving Hampton Roads for two years, has expanded the scope of its business.
When Boxed Gourmet started delivering in September 2016, it stuck to Virginia Beach, but expanded to the entire Southside later that year.
Now, the company has expanded its delivery radius to the Virginia Peninsula and Williamsburg, just a few months after opening its first brick-and-mortar store in Virginia Beach last November.
“The idea came about when my wife, Christine and I were super busy, we get home from work, feed our kids dinner and my wife is eating a bag of chips and we’re both too tired from the workday to try to make anything remotely healthy,” Ben Jones said. “Today, my wife and I are full-time employees, we have six other full-time employees and we make about 2,200 meals a week.”
While Boxed Gourmet started as an a la carte dinner delivery service, the needs of its customers have grown over the years.
The newest delivery options include a fitness menu subscription and corporate catering. The fitness menu, geared toward athletes and fitness buffs, caters to the exact nutritional requirements and constraints of each individual order and those meals are prepared and delivered through a one-week subscription of 10, 12, or 14 meals.
Boxed Gourmet analyzes each person’s macronutrients — carbohydrates, fats and proteins — and weighs each portion to ensure each serving is precise and corresponds to those needs.
“The fitness menu is there for people who have to follow certain restrictions on their diet,” Christine Jones said. “We started with five clients in the beginning of the program and now we have 115.”
The Joneses launched Boxed Gourmet’s catering component for corporate lunches in January. The catering services accommodate parties as small as 10 and as large as 200. Each catering package offers a number of proteins, vegetables, and side choices.
“So many companies have pizza or the same old salads or Chik-Fil-A catered for their lunches, it’s crazy to me, and those meals become some boring and they’re so unhealthy, we wanted to offer local businesses another, better option,” Christine Jones said.
The a la carte options serve those looking for dinner. The menu is available every Tuesday, detailing meals for the following week. Those customers can then decide which meals they desire — whether they want one meal a week or seven. They place their orders by Friday evening for delivery on Sunday, or on Monday evening for delivery on Wednesday and they aren’t bound by order requirements or commitments.
It all started when the Joneses discovered meal programs like Hello Fresh and Blue Apron. According to Christine JOnes, those services worked because they serve high-quality food that came as a complete package. However, the Joneses saw the time and effort it took to make the food as a hindrance.
What’s next for Boxed Gourmet? Ben and Christine hope to continue their mission to help their customers get healthier.
“We live in an age where everyone is super busy and everyone has got a lot of stuff going on,” Ben Jones said. “So the nutrition part of everyone’s lives gets put on the back burner because they’re too tired and too busy. Now they have an easy option that just requires a few clicks of the mouse and you’ve got healthy, gourmet food delivered to your doorstep and you don’t have to worry about it anymore.”
This story was published in partnership with our sister publication, Southside Daily.
